"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Contents:

News in General

March Linux Journal

The March issue of Linux
Journal will be hitting the newsstands
this week. The focus of this issue is Graphical User Interfaces with
articles on XView, GTK+, X-Designer and CDE. Check out the
Table of Contents.

Netscape Announces Plans To Make Source Code Free

January 22, 1998

Netscape Communications Corporation today announced bold plans
to make the source code for the next generation of its highly popular
Netscape Communicator client software available for free licensing on
the Internet. The company plans to post the source code beginning
with the first Netscape Communicator 5.0 developer release, expected
by the end of the first quarter of 1998.

Netscape is releasing its currently available Netscape Navigator and
Communicator Standard Edition 4.0 software products immediately
free for all users.

In addition, the company separately announced the launch of an
aggressive new software distribution program called "Unlimited
Distribution" to broadly distribute its market-leading Internet client
software for free. Unlimited Distribution enables Original Equipment
Manufacturers (OEMs), Internet Service Providers (ISPs),
telecommunications companies, Web content providers, publishers
and software developers to download and redistribute Netscape
Communicator and Netscape Navigator easily with "no strings
attached."

To read and post reactions about this latest announcement, Linux
Journal has added a discussion group to our pages.

Linux in the News

Eric Raymond's article
"The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
evidently made the rounds at Netscape and helped convince them that giving
away Navigator source code was a good idea. If you've never read it, now is
a good time.

The February issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal has an interview with Larry Wall,
the creator of Perl.

The SEUL Project

The SEUL (Simple End-User Linux) Project is an organization dedicated to
developing a free
Linux distribution that presents a viable alternative to commercial
PC operating systems. Currently based on Red Hat Linux, the SEUL
distribution will cover many different aspects of Linux.

Stampede Linux Logo Contest!

Along with the highly anticipated release of Stampede Linux 0.55 (heber),
the developers felt it time to have an official logo. The developers
also felt that they should look elsewhere for development of said logo.
This contest is a result of the looking elsewhere bit. (Yes, prizes are
part of this contest =]).

12th SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATION CONFERENCE (LISA '98)

December 6-11, 1998
Boston, Massachusetts

The LISA '98 program is put together by a volunteer committee of
experienced systems administrators. The Program Committee welcomes
your submission. The Call for Participation is now available at
http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa98/

Sponsored by USENIX, The Advanced Computing Systems Association
Co-Sponsored by SAGE, the System Administrators Guild

Japanese Word Processor

Perhaps you'd like to work on another exciting project? There is
a Windows application, called JWP -- a Japanese Word Processor. This
package was written by Stephen Chung, and as a GNU product it is freely
distributable. I've used it extensively over the past few years, and
it is a *great* package.

Unfortunately, JWP is only available for Windows right now, which is
locking out a lot of people under other platforms who might benefit from
it. As Stephen is quite busy with full-time work and maintaining the
Windows versions (he's developing version 2.00 now), Steve Frampton has
decided to go ahead with a port to X-Windows.

The JWP-Port Project home page contains more information on the JWP
package as well as the JWP-Port project itself. If you are interested,
please visit the page at
http://qlink.queensu.ca/~3srf/jwp-port/.

A 3D CAD Application for Linux Project

FreeDesigner is intended to be a fully extendable
Computer Aided Design and Drafting (CAD) application for Linux and other
Unix type operating systems. Initially K Desktop
Environment and GNOME/GTK frontends will be investigated, although it will
be written as "toolkit inspecific" as is possible, by
utilizing a GUI abstraction layer in FreeDesigner Core.

Artificial Intelligence

Interested in Artificial Intelligence, Eveolutionary Computing,
Connectionism, Artificial Life, and/or Software Agents? Want to find
out what software is available for Linux in these areas? Or are you
just curious?

Digital Domain and Red Hat Linux

Digital Domain used Red Hat Linux not only for special effects in the movie
Titanic but also in commercials that debuted during this Superbowl.
Here's Red Hat's press release.

Software Announcements

eVote 2.2

Date: Wed, 28 Jan 1998

eVote image
eVote is a freely available add-on to email list-servers that gives
the members of the list the ability to poll each other. After
installation of the software, the administrator is not involved. All
participants have the power to open polls, vote, change their votes and
view each other's votes if the particular poll was so configured.
The underlying specialized data-server, The Clerk, is also freely
available for Linux systems only. eVote 2.2 is available in both English
and French.

FunktrackerGOLD 1.1

FunktrackerGOLD 1.1 has been released. FunktrackerGOLD is a module editor for
Linux that allows you to compose digital music (similar to Fasttracker,
Impulsetracker etc for those who are familar with them).

Quikscript

Quikscript is a PostScript text formatting and typesetting program.
It enables documents to be prepared on any type of hardware, using
visible layout marks to control the appearance of the output, and
produce output on a PostScript printer by despatching Qs and the
document file to the device. No processing is performed by the
host hardware; all processing is done within the printer.

The advantage that Quikscript provides, other than portability,
is precision of control over output. Because it is written in
PostScript, it is interpreted at run-time within the printer.
It is possible to create documents that modify the Quikscript
program during execution. It is very easy to include other
PostScript programs or fragments with Quikscript. It is possible
to use special PostScript fonts, such as hand-generated ones.
Graphics generated from a variety of sources can be easily included,
as can text output from computer programs. It is possible to embed
Quikscript within a document, such as an advertisement or a telephone
bill.

The Quikscript distribution is available by anonymous ftp from
"ftp.adfa.oz.au" in the directory "pub/postscript". It may also be
accessed through the World Wide Web at URL
http://www.cs.adfa.oz.au/~gfreeman/

YP-Tools & YP-Server

Version 1.4 of the YP (NIS version 2) tools for Linux has been released.
This package contains ypcat, ypmatch, ypset, ypwhich and yppasswd.
You need this package for GNU C Library 2.x and Linux libc 5.4.21,
but you should use libc 5.4.36 or later due some NIS bugs in libc.
It replaces the old yp-clients 2.2 on this systems.

Version 1.2.7 of an YP (NIS version 2) Server for Linux has been released.
It also runs under SunOS 4.1.x, Solaris 2.4 - 2.6, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX,
Ultrix and OSF1 (alpha).

The programs are needed to turn your workstation in a NIS server.
It contains ypserv, ypxfr, rpc.ypxfrd, rpc.yppasswdd, yppush, ypinit,
revnetgroup, makedbm and /var/yp/Makefile.
This is NOT an NIS+ (NIS version 3) Server !
ypserv 1.2.7 is available under the GNU General Public License.

Motif 2.1 for Linux

The latest and best release of Motif (version 2.1) is now available for
the best operating system!
Linked against both glibc (yes, it DOES work with RedHat 5) and libc (ie
it works with Debian, Caldera, RedHat 4.0).

NetTracker

NetTracker is one of the most powerful, yet easy to use Internet and
Intranet usage tracking programs on the market today. NetTracker allows
marketing professionals, webmasters and ISPs to get the essential
information they need to make informed decisions regarding their web
sites.

A demonstration of NetTracker can be seen at [http://www.sane.com/demo/],
and a free 30 day evaluation copy can be downloaded from
[http://www.sane.com/eval/].

SCEPTRE-90

SCEPTRE-90
a program for the analysis and simulation of
electrical nonlinear networks and dynamic systems
is now available for Linux users (free of charge).
The ftp site, where the program can be found is:
novilux.fh-friedberg.de/pub/sceptre_linux.

Detailed documentation in english and german as well as many samples
are included in the archive file.

BANAL 0.04 (free bookkeeping software)

BANAL is a bookkeeping system that allows you to track invoices,
clients, projects, TODOs, bank accounts and expenses. BANAL is a
client/server application so you can keep one set of books on your
system while allowing everyone access.

For this release, BANAL can store your information, list (and allow
searching of) information and generate invoices, income and expense
statements. You can also make and use recurring and memorized
transactions to ease the burden of creating them manually. Check
the TODO file, that is included with the distribution, for an idea
of what is coming in the next release.

Aegis 3.1 - Software Configuration Management System

Aegis is a transaction-based software configuration management system.
It provides a framework within which a team of developers may work
on many changes to a program independently, and Aegis coordinates
integrating these changes back into the master source of the program,
with as little disruption as possible.

Free CORBA 2 ORB - omniORB 2.4.0

The Olivetti and Oracle Research Laboratory has made available the second
public release of omniORB (version 2.4.0). We also refer to this version
as omniORB2.
omniORB2 is copyright Olivetti & Oracle Research Laboratory. It is free
software. The programs in omniORB2 are distributed under the GNU General
Public Licence as published by the Free Software Foundation. The libraries
in omniORB2 are distributed under the GNU Library General Public
Licence.

New Linux STREAMS Release

Linux STREAMS (LiS) version 1.12 is now available. This version
supports kernels 2.0.24 through 2.0.33. By mutual consent of the
authors, the licensing terms have been changed to the GNU Public Library
License. This allows linking of proprietary STREAMS drivers with the LiS
code.
This version contains an install script which automates the
installation.

Speech Enhancement by Kalman Filtering Package

If you are interested in speech enhancement, signal processing
in general, or applications of Kalman filtering, read on. Mr. Kybic has just
finished his diploma work, entitled "Kalman Filtering and Speech
Enhancement" which includes, among other things, an implementation of
a Kalman smoothing based speech enhancement algorithm, working on
speech signal corrupted by slowly changing coloured additive noise.
Tested on Linux and HP-UX. Parallel version using PVM.
It is not perfect but might be inspiring anyway. Free for
non-commercial use.